GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

TO FARM OR NOT TO FARM • 111
appeared rapidly in the Fertile Crescent after 11,000 B.C., having been
invented for dealing with the newly available abundance of wild cereals.
Those inventions included sickles of flint blades cemented into wooden
or bone handles, for harvesting wild grains; baskets in which to carry the
grains home from the hillsides where they grew; mortars and pestles, or
grinding slabs, to remove the husks; the technique of roasting grains so
that they could be stored without sprouting; and underground storage pits,
some of them plastered to make them waterproof. Evidence for all of these
techniques becomes abundant at sites of hunter-gatherers in the Fertile
Crescent after 11,000 B.C. All these techniques, though developed for the
exploitation of wild cereals, were prerequisites to the planting of cereals
as crops. These cumulative developments constituted the unconscious first
steps of plant domestication.
A fourth factor was the two-way link between the rise in human population
density and the rise in food production. In all parts of the world
where adequate evidence is available, archaeologists find evidence of rising
densities associated with the appearance of food production. Which was
the cause and which the result? This is a long-debated chicken-or-egg
problem: did a rise in human population density force people to turn to
food production, or did food production permit a rise in human population
density?
In principle, one expects the chain of causation to operate in both directions.
As I've already discussed, food production tends to lead to increased
population densities because it yields more edible calories per acre than
does hunting-gathering. On the other hand, human population densities
were gradually rising throughout the late Pleistocene anyway, thanks to
improvements in human technology for collecting and processing wild
foods. As population densities rose, food production became increasingly
favored because it provided the increased food outputs needed to feed all
those people.
That is, the adoption of food production exemplifies what is termed an
autocatalytic process—one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle,
going faster and faster once it has started. A gradual rise in population
densities impelled people to obtain more food, by rewarding those who
unconsciously took steps toward producing it. Once people began to produce
food and become sedentary, they could shorten the birth spacing and
produce still more people, requiring still more food. This bidirectional link
between food production and population density explains the paradox